A weblog for students engaged in doctoral studies in the field of human rights. It is intended to provide information about contemporary developments, references to new publications and material of a practical nature.

Wednesday, 26 March 2014

Radislav Krstić, who was convicted of
aiding and abetting genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the
former Yugoslavia and sentenced to 35 years’ imprisonment, was transferred to
Poland where he is to serve the remainder of his sentence.Krstić was originally sent to the United
Kingdom. There he was brutally attacked by other inmates. He was subsequently
transferred to the Detention Unit in The Hague because he was a witness in
ongoing proceedings. After much hesitation, he has now been sent to Poland.

Krsti?arrived last Saturday and has been placed in a form of interim detention
for a two-month period after which he is to be moved to a prison. Polish courts
have not yet decided how his sentence will be adapted to the realities of
Polish law. Under national legislation, he is entitled to ask for pardon or
conditional release after serving 15 years of his sentence. When he was in
Britain, the date of eligibility for parole was set as 1 June 2016, just over
two years from now. But under Polish law he may already be eligible for parole,
given that his sentence is calculated from 3 December 1998 when he was first
taken into custody by the Tribunal. Polish law does not contemplate a custodial
term longer than 25 years’ imprisonment, although it permits a sentence of life
imprisonment.

There is much information on earlier
stages in the proceedings concerning the detention of Krstić in an article by
Oktawian Kuc in the 2012 edition of the Polish Yearbook of International Law.
There is also a decision concerning his detention issued by the United Kingdom
High Court dated 13 August 2010 ([2010] EWHC 2125 (Admin)).Thanks to Karolina Wierczynska.

The thorough and detailed Report of the Commission of Inquiry on North Korea includes a very complete discussion of crimes against humanity. One of the more innovative aspects of the Commission's discussion concerns mass starvation, something that has been a feature of life in North Korea for many years. The Commission concludes that mass starvation resulting from policy decisions constituted a crime against humanity. The relevant part of the Report begins at paragraph 1115. The Report explains that North Korea had become reliant upon the Soviet Union and China to make up its own deficiencies in food production. But by the 1990s, it could no longer meet its needs for food in this way. The Report continues (at para. 1121):

With a famine already underway, relevant DPRK
officials adopted a series of decisions and policies that violated
international law and aggravated mass starvation. This greatly increased the
number of people who subsequently starved to death. The archives of the DPRK may one day provide greater insights
into the underlying motivations. Based on the testimony and other information
available to it, the Commission could not conclude that DPRK officials acted
with the subjective purpose of starving its general population or even a part
thereof to death. However, according to the
findings of the Commission, the authorities were fully aware that a number of
decisions they took in the 1990s would greatly aggravate mass starvation and the
related death toll in the ordinary course of events. They nevertheless took
these decisions because they prioritized the preservation of the
political system of the DPRK, the Supreme Leader and the elites surrounding him. As noted above, this level of criminal intent is sufficient for the
crime of extermination.

This is among the very interesting findings of the Commission. Its Report runs to more than 370 pages.

Tuesday, 25 March 2014

From 27-28 June 2014, Bangor Law School and the Bangor Centre for International Law will host a conference on proof in international criminal trials, kindly funded by the British Academy. Here is the conference abstract:

“There is now an impressive body of literature on the precise scope, context and application of evidentiary rules in international criminal trials. However, the issues surrounding proof and reasoning on evidence in international criminal law have remained relatively under-examined to date. By bringing together judges, practitioners and leading scholars on evidence, international criminal procedure and analytical methods, this conference will comprehensively address issues related to proof in international criminal proceedings. These issues include, inter alia, the means by which inferences are drawn, how reasoning on findings of fact is articulated in judgments, and how witness credibility is assessed. Participants will analyse some of the challenges of fact-finding in the complex context of international criminal trials, which often involve large masses of evidence and hundreds of witnesses.”

Monday, 17 March 2014

Readers of this blog will doubtless be aware that the ICC’s Trial Chamber II convicted Germain Katanga of murder as a crime against humanity and four counts of war crimes on Friday, 7 March. The judgment includes a 170-page 'minority opinion' from Judge van den Wyngaert, and a ‘concurring opinion’ from Judges Cotte and Diarra. It is unprecedented, and quite bizarre, for a majority of judges to issue a joint separate opinion concurring with themselves (this is something we can usually take as a given).

The Rome Statute introduces a requirement that crimes against humanity must be committed as part of a ‘state or organisational policy’. In a dissenting opinion in the Ruto et al. confirmation decision, Judge Kaul argued that an organisation, for these purposes, had to be ‘state-like’. The Katanga judgment, referring to the object and purpose of the Statute, held that a requirement that the organisation possess quasi-state characteristics would not enhance the aim of the Statute to punish those who have committed the gravest crimes (para. 1121). Instead, the sole requirement for an organisation in this context is the means and resources to carry out an attack on the civilian population. This reasoning essentially renders the requirement of a pre-existing organisational policy an irrelevance – once an attack has been carried out, it will suffice that the perpetrators had the ability to carry out such an attack for them to be considered an ‘organisation’.

Similarly circular reasoning is found in the judgment on the ‘policy’ requirement. The Chamber noted that, in most cases, the existence of a prior policy to carry out an attack on the civilian population will have to be inferred, after the fact, from an examination of the attack. It noted (para. 1110) that a policy in this context ‘may face an evolutionary process’ that might not be set in stone from the outset of the attack, or even when the attack against civilians has commenced. This means that the policy requirement will be met when the Chamber is convinced that an attack has in fact taken place. In effect, what had been seen as an additional burden for the prosecution to prove – the existence of a state or organisational policy to carry out an attack against a civilian population – has been relegated to a requirement to prove simply that an attack took place.

On the classification of the armed conflict as non-international, the Chamber determined that the Ngiti fighters in Walendu-Bindi were an organised armed group. This was despite the fact that the group did not have a single name that they acted under, or an identified leader, or a clear chain of command. The Chamber felt that it ‘could not adhere to the defence thesis’ (para. 680) that these were relatively autonomous groups. However, as Judge van den Wyngaert pointed out in her dissenting opinion, judges are not obliged to accept one party’s theory of the case over another, but rather consider whether an alternative explanation offers reasonable doubt on the guilt of the accused.

At trial, Katanga waived his right to silence and testified about his role as co-ordinator. This was relevant to his defence under the original charge under Article 25(3)(a), which required that he had control over the perpetrators. However, under the new mode of liability, precisely this testimony was used as a basis of his conviction because, the Chamber held, he had illustrated his ‘significant contribution’ for the purposes of Article 25(3)(d). This clearly raises issues on the right to freedom from self-incrimination and will have an immeasurable impact on defence strategies in future cases, given that it is now foreseeable that defence evidence may be used against the accused in amended charges.

Lastly, the rather shocking remark, at paragraph 70 of the judgment, must be noted. The Chamber stated that just because the accused has not been convicted of certain charges, it does not mean that he is actually innocent, just that there was insufficient evidence to prove him guilty beyond reasonable doubt. How any judge can reconcile such a statement with the presumption of innocence is a mystery.

The Editorial Team

W. Schabas, Y. McDermott, J. Powderly, N. Hayes

William A. Schabas is professor of international law at Middlesex University in London. He is also professor of international criminal law and human rights at Leiden University, emeritus professor human rights law at the Irish Centre for Human Rights of the National University of Ireland Galway, and an honorary professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in Beijing and Wuhan University. He is the author of more than 20 books and 300 journal articles, on such subjects as the abolition of capital punishment, genocide and the international criminal tribunals. Professor Schabas was a member of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He was a member of the Board of Trustees of the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Technical Cooperation in Human Rights and president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. He serves as president of the Irish Branch of the International Law Association chair of the Institute for International Criminal Investigation. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a member of the Royal Irish Academy. Here is the full c.v.

Dr YvonneMcDermott is Senior Lecturer in Law at Bangor University, UK, where she is also Director of Teaching and Learning and Co-Director of the Bangor Centre for International Law. Yvonne is a graduate of the National University of Ireland, Galway (B. Corp. Law, LL.B.), Leiden University (LL.M. cum laude) and the Irish Centre for Human Rights (Ph.D.). Her research focuses on fair trial rights, international criminal procedure and international criminal law. She is the author of Fairness in International Criminal Trials (Oxford University Press, 2016).

Niamh Hayes has been the Head of Office for the Institute for International Criminal Investigations (IICI) in The Hague since September 2012. She is about to complete her Ph.D. on the investigation and prosecution of sexual violence by international criminal tribunals at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland Galway. She previously worked for Women's Initiatives for Gender Justice as a legal consultant, and as an intern for the defence at the ICTY in the Karadzic case. She has lectured on international criminal law and international law at Trinity College Dublin and, along with Prof. William Schabas and Dr. Yvonne McDermott, is a co-editor of The Ashgate Research Companion to International Criminal Law: Critical Perspectives (Ashgate, 2013). She is the author of over 45 case reports for the Oxford Reports on International Criminal Law and has published numerous articles and book chapters on the investigation and prosecution of sexual and gender-based violence as international crimes.

Joseph Powderly is Assistant Professor of Public International Law at the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, Leiden University. Between September 2008 and January 2010, he was a Doctoral Fellow/Researcher at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, where he worked, among other projects, on a Irish Government-funded investigation and report into the possible perpetration of crimes against humanity against the Rohingya people of North Rakhine State, Burma/Myanmar. He is currently in the process of completing his doctoral research which looks at the impact of theories of judicial interpretation on the development of international criminal and international humanitarian law. The central thesis aims to identify and analyze the potential emergence of a specific theory of interpretation within the sphere of judicial creativity. Along with Dr. Shane Darcy of the Irish Centre for Human Rights, he is co-editor of and contributor to the edited collection Judicial Creativity in International Criminal Tribunals which was published by Oxford University Press in 2010. He has written over 80 case-reports for the Oxford Reports on International Criminal Law, as well as numerous book chapters and academic articles on topics ranging from the principle of complementarity to Irish involvement in the drafting of the Geneva Conventions. In December 2010, he was appointed Managing Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Criminal Law Forum. His research interests while focusing on international criminal and international humanitarian law also include topics such as the history of international law and freedom of expression.

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Interested in PhD studies in human rights?

Students interested in pursuing a doctorate in the field of human rights are encouraged to explore the possibility of working at Middlesex University under the supervision of Professor William A. Schabas and his colleagues. For inquiries, write to: w.schabas@mdx.ac.uk.